GRS 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Ancient Greek Art

• School: University of Victoria
• Department: Greek and Roman Studies
• Course: GRS 200
• Professor: Bowman Laurel

Document Summary

Lecture vi: classical mythology in context chapter 2 (continued) Pandora: everything is her fault because she opens the box. Evil inside but you can"t tell. In greek culture, prometheus is punished because he went against zeus: this punishment carries into later art, but in the 19th century he starts being depicted as the lightbringer/unrepentant of his crimes. Myths re-explain and reinforce social institutions of a culture: e. g. A family controls an island because their ancestors came out of the ground there: different social context = different myths w/ different meanings, explain why people do/should behave in a certain way. The theogony is essentially a greek creation myth, but hesiod didn"t think that the origins of mankind were important enough to explain: later myth says that prometheus made man out of clay. Enuma elish: babylonian creation story: may have influenced greek oral poetry similarities.